A bloodthirsty, troll-slaying Amazon Queen

Also Xochiquetzl @ DW and AO3. writer, Ravenclaw, MOT, fandom old, fannish contrarian, studied at the Sith Academy, anti-racist transgender-supporting feminist, bisexual/cisgender panromantic demisexual/queer. She/her/hers. The Q in LGBTQIA stands for Queer and the A stands for Asexual. Please don't follow me if you're a minor; I am old and post adult things.

[systlin]

Every time I see bullshit about women never EVER being able to beat men in any sport, I think about how in martial arts classes I, a cis woman, 5' 8" and 145 pounds, regularly beat the tar out of 6' 2" 230 pound cis dude weightlifters. One guy ragequit class. He came in cocky as hell and talking the standard bs line about how a woman simply never could beat a man in a fight because they're physically weaker and our instructor was like. Okay. Put the pads on you're sparring her. Yes, her, the one 4" shorter and 100 pounds lighter than you.

It wasn't close I beat the pants off that man, and others like him. I did it more than once. Some guys got humble and stayed. One guy got angry and stormed out.

And I think about that every fuck damn time I hear that bullshit, which seems to be all the fuck over the place these days. Oh, women are just fragile little soft delicate flower creatures who can't do ANYTHING and could NEVER compete with big strong manly muscular strong MEN.

I think about driving that dude into the mats and seeing the brutal reality of this big dude's misogany meet the realization that a woman was beating his ass literally that second, that none of his strength could stop the fact that I'd just hip thrown him facefirst into the mats and that had I actually connected with the axe kick to his neck I would have crushed a bunch of important shit and he could not stop me, and his whole psyche collapsing like a dying star in that moment.

Anyway, don't ever fall for it, ladies, and there's absolutely no goddamn reason to get your knickers in a twist about trans people in sports.

[syakess1]

filthy dog meme

[isaiahmustafa]

Watson and I feel that, in order to do our best work, the chemistry needs to be right.

[lovepsychothefirst]

#see THIS is what makes Sherlock in Elementary so unique#a lot of versions of Sherlock#or pretty much Any modern crime drama would have the brilliant detective calling the other detectives ‘idiots’#or ‘amateurs’ or basically insulting their intelligence and ability as detectives#here Sherlock is both acknowledging their skill as detectives and crediting that to their Captain’s leadership#while also acknowledging that he can’t work with them because THEY don’t like him#all the while he is accepting as fair because he’s self-aware to know he’s not easy to work with#there are ways to depict an anti-social genius without being a huge asshole to everyone#and this is it

[xochiquetzl]

Free book! | Katherine Villyard

Immortal Gifts is FREE in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Apple, and Google.

[hallowedlore]

this is targeted tumblr content

[not-freyja]

Okay but this is actually a perfect translation into modern slang, with the rhythmic nature if the speech preserved?

[charlesoberonn]

[xochiquetzl]

Audiobook links! | Katherine Villyard

[xochiquetzl]

The Immortal Gifts Podcast! | Katherine Villyard

[neenarchive]

really hilarious and unsexy when hetero romantasy authors refer to love interests as males and females. you sound like david attenborough narrating a special documentary on two turtles humping in the mud

[neenarchive]

i don't care if he's the king of the fae. if that man called me a desirable female i'd have him gelded

[alexanderwales]

I do think it's a beautiful thing when an author is clearly going for a metaphor, but the diegesis gets in the way. The story has symbols, but they're not just symbols, they're real things that exist within the world of that story, and as soon as the reader thinks about this, the symbol can be shattered.

I don't know what it is I find nice about this, but maybe it's the wet impact of meaning-making against base reality.

[alexanderwales]

I was asked for examples, here are two:

X-men is always the one that comes to mind, where superpowers are a metaphor for being gay, or Jewish, or non-white, but on a diegetic level, superpowers include things like mind control and being bulletproof and blowing up things. So then you have mutant registration drawn as a parallel to the government making lists of undesirables, but what the writers have done is made imagined threat into literal threat, as the people with superpowers actually can effortlessly murder someone. That is, the false rhetoric of destruction has become literalized.

There are mecha shows where piloting the mecha is a metaphor for the overwhelming burdens placed on children, but diegetically it actually is the fate of the world, and so this might be seen to justify things that are completely unjustified. If failing a test is literally going to result in hundreds of people dying, then the cruel authority figures are making uncomfortable triage decisions by putting enormous pressure on the cadets. And if, in the metaphor, the parents need to come to the realization that their children should be allowed to live their own lives ... we can kind of see how that doesn't work if the end result is that a kaiju stomps the country flat.

[feotakahari]

I swear I read a book that was supposed to be pro-gay that treated its gayness metaphor as a contagious, curable disease. Also, being gay meant you could regenerate from any injury and it felt really good, so before the protagonist got infected, she nearly got killed by accidentally walking in on two gay teenagers blowing each other up with a grenade as a sex equivalent.

[jambeast]

It's why, I think, in pretty much every story about aliens/robots/elves/mutants/etc, it's a mistake to read the aliens/robots/elves/mutants as a direct one-to-one metaphor where something said about the aliens/robots/elves/mutants is something said about gays/browns/disableds for anything. Because gay people don't come from space, and disabled people can't shoot lasers, and if you were to imply that one were the same as the other you would be wrong, because they are not the same.

But it's always gonna have similarities though, right? Humans react to groups-of-people-that-are-not-like-them in semi-predictable ways, not always the same way, but there are commonalities. It's kind of inevietable that if you had aliens/robots/elves/mutants in your story then people would react to them in a kind of a way, and that way would *rhyme* with the way they react to existent types of people, especially if you want to be remotely interesting about it, even just on an individual psychological emotional level.

And that inevietabiltiy is something that makes it almost like... not worth criticising. Obviously if you interpret the orcs from mordor as a one-to-one substitution of Canadian people then Lord of the Rings would be a horrifically Canuckphobic piece of media, but you really don't *have* to interpret them as a one-to-one substitution!

There's a bad tendency in a lot of lefty media crit to act as though stories about aliens, robots, elves and mutants *aren't* about aliens, robots, elves and mutants, as if that's always just a thin and unimportant veneer laid over stories about real life social issues for a bit of flavour.

But no! Stories about aliens, robots, elves and mutants REALLY ARE about aliens robots elves and mutants! These people care about aliens robots elves and mutants and really do want to write about them!

[tanadrin]

I think in general there is a tendency by many critics to act as if a speculative fiction story cannot be reduced to mere allegory, it is of no value, because they are fundamentally not very interested in speculative fiction. But applicability is not the same as allegory, and the former is often more interesting (and has more to say).

[sunderwight]

Yeah, the allegory rarely works all the way down, but that doesn't mean it's not still working as intended.

Like let's take the X-Men example. While it's true that in-universe there's more of a case to be made for regulating super powers that let people just like, turn a car inside-out with their mind, than drummed up hysteria about immigrants or something, it's also the case in-universe that the people pushing for so-called regulation are more concerned with controlling/weaponizing any useful abilities for their own gain and experimenting on or otherwise persecuting those who aren't exploitable, and that lumping everyone from the guy with the world-shattering psychic abilities to the kid who just kind of looks like a fish into a singular category that would all become indefinite wards of the state is bad business.

This highlights that even in cases where you might think, huh I wouldn't mind actually if someone in a uniform came and took that particularly destructive asshole I know away, you must be careful not to actually advocate for that, because you will be playing into the hands of people who do not have anyone else's best interests actually at heart. Like, maybe you did get mugged by an illegal immigrant or something, that would really suck and desperate people do tend to do shitty things, but it still wouldn't make endorsing ICE the right thing to do.

And that is the serious real-world applicable point the narrative is trying to make, where even if the bad guys have a leg to stand on that doesn't mean you should automatically agree with how or why they want to go about doing things. X-Men goes, you have to pay attention to who is really doing what, not just who scares you more.

But if you try and extend it too far it will break and stop making sense. Because it's fiction.

[meveka]

🐺

[aggot]

let's reintroduce "rude" to the lexicon no that person is not evil or morally bankrupt or even your enemy they're just being rude

[fluorescentbrains]

seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors

[insomniac-arrest]

I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me

Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.

[furiousfurious]

Left this in the notes

[insomniac-arrest]

😂

[goodattellinglies]

[xochiquetzl]

Men: I don’t know why women are so upset and grossed out about porn 🙄

Also men: Porn for women? EWWW THE DOWNFALL OF SOCIETY!!!!

[corgi-nub]

Last sketch of last night's stream. It's Snupin!

[buddie-romance]

thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3

[fluorescentbrains]

seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors

[insomniac-arrest]

I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me

Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.

[furiousfurious]

Left this in the notes

[insomniac-arrest]

😂

[goodattellinglies]

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

Leverage S05E01 The (Very) Big Bird Job.